Gold 999 – 24 Carat

To fully grasp what gold 999 is you need an appreciation of what gold hallmarks are and why they are important. ‘999’ gold is just one of many different types of hallmarks.

If a gold product bears the hallmark ‘999’, then your gold has been tested and classed as 24 carat or 99.9 per cent pure.

The remaining 0.1 per cent of the item may be composed of a different metal such as nickel, copper, or in some cases silver. Therefore a 24 carat piece is still an alloy of Gold and essentially insignificant other metals with a minimum Gold content of 99.9%.

Pure Gold is quite soft and malleable and is therefore not generally suitable for everyday wear. It is therefore surprising that many Asian cultures produce high purity jewellery for daily wear. One explanation is a long standing cultural affinity with gold whereby families will often pool resources to buy jewellery as a store of wealth that is easily transported or sold in unsettled times and does not require the involvement of a banking system that may be difficult to access.

24 Carat Gold is also used by many countries to produce investment bars and coins. In most cases the purity of investment gold is slightly higher than that used for jewellery items and is rated in ‘fineness’ of .9999 or 99.99%.

In order to calculate a price for a jewellery item, the live gold price is applied to the weight of pure or fine gold in an item, rather than the overall weight of the product. For example, if the spot price of gold was £1000 per troy ounce, and you have one ounce of 24 carat gold, your gold would be roughly worth £999.00.

Our 24 carat Gold Price Chart has been designed to simplify this process and already applies the calculation required to produce an actual Price Chart for 24 Carat Gold.